


Just Give Me This One Day

by Marvelite5Ever



Category: Cable and Deadpool, Deadpool (Comics), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Blind Al interrupts Wade's brooding, Bob interrupts Wade's brooding, Gen, I don't know what this fic is, It's just really weird, M/M, Nate interrupts Wade's brooding, Wade doesn't want to do anything, Wade has weird thoughts, Wadek kicks them all out, Weasel interrupts Wade's brooding, and depression, and pain, aside from dwell in misery, but he keeps getting interrupted, but things get better in the end, stuff is creepy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 15:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5421641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marvelite5Ever/pseuds/Marvelite5Ever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After over two weeks of nonstop work—nonstop killing, nonstop dying, nonstop injuries, nonstop joking—Wade just wants a day, <i>one</i> fucking day, to do absolutely <i>nothing.</i></p>
<p>Is that really too much to ask?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Give Me This One Day

**Author's Note:**

> This happened because my first few days of winter break, I've been feeling lethargic as hell, weird as fuck, and irritable as all get out. So this is basically based on those first few depressive days of vacation after having been in finals overdrive. 
> 
> And then I wanted to write something, and decided to listen to dark, creepy indie music, and this happened, and I just let it run off wherever.
> 
> So basically, word vomit. But who am I kidding? That's what all my fics are, really.

* * *

_**~Wade's apartment, 2:03 AM~** _

* * *

When Wade stumbled into his apartment – or rather, _tumbled_ into his apartment, since he came in through the window – after his seventh back-to-back mission in a period of two weeks (which, for all you non-mathy types out there, meant that Wade had undertaken an average of one mission every two days, so he'd only had two days to carry out each mission, and usually one of those days was spent just with travel – except that one mission had taken one week all by itself, because it was a long and complicated undercover and shit mission, which meant that, for the next week, he was actually undertaking at least two missions at any given time), Wade collapsed onto his bed without even changing out of his Deadpool costume, groaning like a dying man. 

Which, he supposed, he still kinda was, considering how the wounds he'd gotten from the magical sword two days ago still hadn't healed, and his insides were basically only held inside him with a layer of duct tape. 

“Heh, duct tape. Duct tape. Duct tape. Duct tape. Duck tape. Duck tape. Duck. Duck. Duckity-duck-duck. Duck. Goose. Fucking hate fucking goose chases. Have you ever been bitten by a goose?”

{Yes.}

“It fucking _hurts_ , man. They're mean birds. Mean, mean nasty birds. And they leave their turds all over the lawn, like dogs that nobody ever picks up after. Leaves your boots all shitty. Fucking shit.”

{If I didn't know better, I'd say that you're totally WASTED, dude.}

_[Except that we do know better. So we know that you're actually just like this all the time.]_

“Mommy, the voices in my head are being mean to me again,” was whined, muffled, into the pillow. 

Wade wondered if it was a feathered pillow. He should cut it apart with a katana to see. 

“It better not be a fucking goose-feather pillow.”

{Heh, yeah, wonder what your mommy would have said to that.}

“To a goose-feathered pillow?”

{No, to the fact that you had claimed to have mean voices in your head.}

“'M pretty sure I didn't always have mean voices in my head. 'M pretty sure I didn't always have voices in my head in the first place.”

_[Not that it would have mattered, since you could never have told your mother, anyway. Not since she died of cancer when you were five.]_

“Why do you have to be so _mean?”_ Wade complained exhaustedly, shoving his head under the pillow, so that when he kept speaking, he barely hear what he was saying. “Why can't you leave me the fuck _alone_ for once? Actually, y'know what? Tomorrow, you're not allowed to speak to me. I am not talkin' to fucking _anybody_ tomorrow – including you two! – and I'm not fucking _doin'_ anything, either. And I'm not gonna go any-fucking-where. I've earned that! A day of doing nothing! I've been working nonstop for _weeks_ —”

_[Yeah, and why did you do that again?]_

“Because it was my fucking _job_ you—”

_[Yeah, but you didn't_ have _to take all those jobs, y'know.]_

“Yeah, well, I _wanted to!”_

{To keep your mind of a certain you-know-who.}

“I was trying not to think of Voldemort?”

_[Honestly, who here does he think he's fooling with the stupidity act?]_

{Dunno. Not me!}

“I'm done arguing with you guys,” Wade grumbled, rolling over onto his back – twinging as the large, duct-taped-shut wound in his chest pulled – and glaring up at the ceiling. 

However, the position wasn't that comfortable. 

Wade removed the gun from the back of his pants, tossing it to the side carelessly – it didn't go off, because it had the safety on, duh! You always put the safety on for guns you stick into your pants, it's, like, the law of Not Being A Complete Idiot or something like that – and then lying on his back was comfortable. 

It was either lie on his stomach or his back – no sleeping on his side when all that was keeping his insides actually _inside_ was duct tape, and he didn't particularly want them to spill out all over his bed, and – holy _hell_ o's looked fucking weird when they were typed. Other letters just kinda slipped out of the cursor, but o's fucking _popped_ out. Huh. 

“And who the hell chose this playlist, anyway?”

_[It's completely silent, genius.]_

{Ah, no! This song is fucking creeping me out!}

“Hm, silence is a creepy song. I like that. It seems poetic. And, like, really deep, or something. Doesn't that seem deep to you? And also a totally legit excuse for my constant need to talk. 'Why can't you shut up Wade?!' 'Because the silence a creepy song, dude! Can't ya hear it?' The silence is fucking terrifying in the same way as mirrors, right? Because of the truths and reflections and shit?” 

_[What the hell are you_ high _on?]_

“I'm high on _myself!”_

{Oh, that sounded so wrong…} 

“Holy shit, that was a lot of o's. Agh! That was a lot of o's, too! Shit! I don't like o's right now. Agh, stop! Wait, no—gah! Cease! Cease with that dreaded letter of the alphabet! We are hereby restricted in using that letter.” 

{No more o's!}

“Hey! That was three've 'im! Un-allowed!” 

_[Wow, you're really having to get creative when not using that vowel, huh?]_

“Fuck y—shit. Fuck—shit. Fuck me!” 

_[Lol.]_

“Shut up!” Angrily, Wade wrenched the pillow out from under his head and threw it at where the text boxes were floating in his vision. “I just wanna fucking _sleep_ , ya understand?! I'm fucking _tired. Exhausted,_ even. Hell, I can't remember when I last felt this fucking _tired...”_

Luckily, Wade always kept two pillows on his bed, so he grabbed the other one and hugged it to his face. 

No, you read that right—he hugged it to his _face,_ not his chest. 

“J'st wanna sleep.” 

_[Yeah, good luck with that, what with the searing pain where our internal organs or mashed together in a really-fucking-slowly healing mess. That means we can't even eat or drink anything, since stuff hasn't righted itself yet.]_

_[So on top of the pain of a ripped-open midriff, you also have the hunger pain to deal with, and the thirst headache.]_

“Yeah, dude, I fucking get it! I'm miserable, okay?! I fucking _know that!_ So leave me alone, why don't you?!” 

{You used an entire SIX o's in that piece of dialogue!} 

Wade clutched the pillow closer over his face, so close he could hardly breathe. “Go to hell.” 

{Whenever you do, mon ami!} 

_[Which will be… hm, let's see…_ never. _]_

Wade growled into the pillow. Usually, when he wanted some peace and quiet in a situation like this, he'd just shoot himself in the head. But he felt too lethargic to even do that, at the moment. 

Maybe he could suffocate himself with the pillow, though. 

_[Wouldn't count on it.]_

{Seriously, guys. Nobody else is getting creeped out by this music??}

“Wimp. Are you really that scared of a little silence?” Wade challenged, removing the pillow from his face and glaring at the boxes challengingly. 

What the voice replied made him still. 

{Aren't YOU?}

“…” Wade said, blinking up at the dark, night-hazy ceiling above him, away from the glaring text of the bodes. “...No, I'm not. No.”

_[Maybe you should be.]_

There were a few (blissful? haunting? disturbing?) moments of silence, before the bold/yellow text box started singing: 

{Oooooooooh, leaves you high as a Kree ship, ooooooooh, leaves your heart like a joystick, oooooooooh, leaves you absolutely dareless…} 

Wade grunted, too tired to comment, closing his eyes and rolling over again – to a sharp twinging in his midsection, but whatever – to bury his face into the pillow. 

_[What the hell was that?]_

{Hey, somebody needs to fill up the silence! What else are we supposed to do?!}

Was sleep so out of the question? 

...Apparently, it was.

* * *

_**~Wade's apartment, 8:31 AM~** _

* * *

Wade didn't feel like he'd gotten any sleep at all, but perhaps he'd slipped in and out of slumber fitfully, but had submerged in the dark waves, however briefly, nonetheless, because when there was a knock on the door, he was jerked suddenly and harshly out of a dark floating place where the words of the voices in his head blurred into a murmur of waves, and his mind felt black and kind of bruise-deep-purple as he was tumbled over and over and over in currents of senseless and eleven-twelfths-incoherent thoughts, even if those thoughts had edges that scratched and left the inside of his head feeling as bloodied and raw and numb as he'd felt while stumbling through the snow and trying to hold his gushing insides in from a wound that should have killed him with a scratch but which was healing like trickling molasses, except that there was less white everywhere—no white this time, really, just a slimy blackness like the skin of a manta ray—and Wade wondered how the hell normal people managed to stay alive so long when they were so soft and delicate and everything was trying to kill them and their bodies weren't helping. 

At one point during the night, Wade felt a certain hollow, dusty emptiness pervade his mind, and the distinct sensation of part of his skull crumbling away, and when he got up to check in the mirror, he found that there was a gaping hole in the side of his head, near the back, and that there was nothing inside but darkness and cobwebs. 

The skin of his face was peeling flaking off in a slip and slide of muscle off bone, and he felt as if he were rotted from the inside out, and he wondered where his brain had gone—if it had just fallen right out of the hole in his skull and he just hadn't noticed, or if something had bashed open his skull and eaten it and he just couldn't remember.

But when he was startled awake by the knocking at the door, he was pretty sure that he'd never actually moved, and that he didn't actually have any mirrors in his apartment anymore, anyway. And when he ran a hand back over the part of his head where the hole had been, he found it whole {Hah} and his cancerous skin still clinging desperately to the muscle and bone there, and on his face, too. 

“Hey Wade! Can I come in?” called a familiar voice. “Wade? Are you—oh, the door's unlocked.” 

Light, nervous footsteps started making their way through his apartment, and the voice continued, “So, uh, Wade. You here? I took a look at your laptop after you gave it to me saying that nothing was working, and I think the problem was with the KDE graphical desktop environment. So I switched you over to XFCE for now. Try it out for a day, and if there's no problems we'll know that the issue was with KDE, not your laptop. 

“Anyways, XFCE used to have an audio problem, which was why I gave up on it. Admittedly, that was about five years ago, but the desktop environment had had the audio problem for about five years before that and hadn't fixed, so maybe it still has it. Or maybe they finally got around to fixing it. Anyway, you should try playing some music on your laptop to see. 

“Although the advantage of XFCE is that, because it's a lightweight desktop environment, even though it's not as powerful as KDE it's definitely faster—there's no fade-in or fade-out features, everything just appears immediately, so there's that.” 

By now, Weasel had finally made his way to Wade's bedroom. 

“Uhhh, Wade?” he asked tentatively, pushing the ajar door open further with a toe, sticking his head through nervously. “Are you alright?” 

Wade lethargically through a knife at him without looking. 

Weasel squeaked, ducking back behind the door and scrambling not to drop the laptop under his arm. 

“Uhh, okay, you're in a bad mood,” Weasel said nervously. “I'll just, uh, leave your laptop on the coffee table, okay? Okay. Uh. Feel better…?” 

Weasel's footsteps retreated, there was the sound of him carefully setting the laptop on the coffee table, and then a few moments later the apartment door was pulled shut. 

{That was nice of him.}

_[Yeah, and what do you do in thanks? Throw a knife at him.]_

{Dig up the bones but leave the soul aaaaalone…}

_[Would you stop fucking singing already?! It's really getting on my nerves!]_

Wade groaned and shoved his head under the pillow again, pulling it down over his ears. Not that helped any, since the voices were in his head, and covering his ears only made them louder. Also, he could see them as textboxes, so he was always getting assaulted by Yellow and White with _two_ of his six (or was it seven?) senses. Which made them much, much harder to ignore. 

{Why would you want to ignore us?! What would you do WITHOUT us?!}

_[Yeah. Because without us, what would you be?]_

{ALONE, that's what. And if I recall correctly, that's your greatest fear, right? To be all alone?}

“I don't need you,” Wade muttered, rolling over again and shoving the pillow away—pain in his midriff again, but whatever. 

{'Midriff' is a funny word.}

_[Face it—you'd be lost without us.]_

{Miserable.}

“I was _fine_ without you!” Wade said, but he lacked the energy to imbue his words with the due amount of vehemence. 

_[I call bullshit. When have you ever been fine?]_

“Yeah, well, I call bullshit, too!” Wade grumbled, tossing a hand limply over his face, wishing that closing his eyes made it so he couldn't see the text boxes. “Because when have I ever _not_ be miserable?” 

{The best of us can find happiness iiiin mii-iii-iiiisery!}

_[Did anybody else just look at the word 'misery' and see 'military'?]_

“I was _not_ miserable in the military! Actually, I think that was one of the times when I was actually the _least_ miserable, thank you very much!”

_[I just meant that the words look similar, especially when you stick too many i's into the word 'misery.' Because too many eyes end up blurring into l's and t's.]_

{Wait, then how did you turn the e into an a?}

_[I think I accidentally flipped it upside-down. Lowercase e's and a's, when they're in regular text and not in italics, if you flip them upside-down, they actually look a lot like each other.]_

{Huh. I'd never realized that regular lowercase a's and italic lowercase a's looked so different before! Ooh, admire my a's! My a's are cooler than yours!}

_[They are not! My a's are cooler!]_

Wade was too tired to tell them to shut up. It would be a useless endeavor, anyway, since they wouldn't and didn't shut up. Sometimes Wade could actually understand why everybody hated him. 

(Scratch that—he _always_ understood why everybody hated him.)

{Ooh, are you throwing a pity party? Can we join?}

_[Somebody forgot the punch.]_

“I'm not throwing a pity party,” Wade said, rolling over again (ouch). “I'm too tired to throw a pity party. I just want to _sleep.”_

_[Yeah, good luck with that.]_

{Ooh! Deja vu!}

The voices kept bickering, and Wade turned his head to apathetically watch the light in the window change.

The silence, the lighting, the slight throb behind his eyes—everything felt lemon-yellow; sour and bitter and eye-scrunching and fuck-what-is-this-weird-aftertaste-in-my-mouth and I'm-not-gonna-do-a-fucking-thing-cuz-I-don't-feel-like-it-so-fuck-off. All of it lemon-yellow. 

{Leeeeeemon eeeyes…} 

_[And when life gives you lemons…]_

{Throw them back and demand grenades!}

_[Or eat the lemons raw and then spit the acidic juice back in life's face. Really stings the eyes.]_

{Yeah, but grenades blow shit up! Hey—there's pineapple grenades, but are there lemon grenades?}

_[There's lemon timers.]_

{Do they explode?}

_[With noise, yeah.]_

{Huh. Why does a lemon make noise when it explodes?}

_[What_ doesn't _make noise when it explodes?]_

{...Good point.}

Everything in Wade's head felt mucky, and everything about his body was heavy, and he knew he should probably get up and change out of the Deadpool outfit, take a shower, change the duct tape bandages, check the injury, change the bloodied sheets, maybe try to eat or drink something. 

But he couldn't get himself to move. Even though he was bloody and dirty, he didn't feel like getting clean. Even though he was hurting, he didn't feel like helping the healing process along. Even though he was hungry and thirsty, he didn't feel like eating or drinking. 

He just wanted to lie there. 

He could get up tomorrow. He get clean tomorrow. He could heal tomorrow. He could eat and drink tomorrow. Tomorrow he could pick himself up off the fucking ground and keep moving on. 

But not today. But wasn't that okay? If he just took one fucking day for himself to not do anything? He didn't have to be doing something all the time. 

_[Except when you're trying to avoid thinking about a certain big, buff, white-haired Summers.]_

{Yeah, but he's not dead anymore! So we don't have to avoid thinking about him!}

_[I hope you've got a safety net. Because I'm going to push you over the edge.]_

{Hey! Hypocrite! Now you're doing it, too! You say that Iiiiiiii'm delirious…}

_[Okay, stop, I'm getting creeped out now.]_

{I TOLD YOU SO!}

_[Oh no…]_

{HAH! Taaaaake your faaaaace off!}

_[Shut up.]_

“Seconded,” Wade groaned, jabbing his fingers into his eyes, making them smart and water, the front part of his brain swimming. 

When he opened them back up, the edges of everything were soft and blurry, and he couldn't read the text of the boxes. 

Awesome sauce. 

Lifting a gloved hand, he stared at its blurry black form against the blurry background of the off-white ceiling, moving his fingers around to make blurry, amorphous shapes. 

Tambourine hand, octopus fingers, thunderhead palm. 

His vision started to clear, his hand losing the magic and the the spiral staircase of text boxes coming back into focus. 

{Wow, he's really easily entertained, isn't he?}

_[Like a baby. The toy isn't as interesting as the box it came in.]_

{Ah, but you can do so many different things with a box!}

_[Only one use for a grenade, true.]_

{Blowing shit up! You can do more with guns and swords. Especially swords. You can do a lot of different things with swords.}

_[But you can't blow shit up with them.]_

{Ha! True!}

“How are you two always so _jolly?”_ Wade grumbled, glaring at them. 

_[I do not understand what you're saying. I do not understand the meaning of the word 'jolly.' Is it a flavor of lollipop?]_

{Jolly is easy! Even DEATH can do it! HO. HO. HO.}

_[Wrong Death.]_

{'Jolly' is such a weird word. I prefer the terms 'enthusiastic' and 'optimistic.' And it's easy, cuz we aren't living your suck life! We're just watching it, so we can laugh at your misfortune. BWAH. HA. HA.}

“Nnng,” Wade muttered, rolling over again (ouch), head on his arms as he gazed dully at the floor over the side of the bed. 

_[Ever with the mordant wit.]_

Wade started counting the blood stains on the carpet. 

He should really get a black carpet or something, so the stains didn't show so much. 

He didn't look outside when he heard it start to rain, the pounding and pattering and pittering, like a giant, tapdancing centipede. Or millipede, or something. Like that. Whatever. 

{Wow, way to ruin a soothing sound, dude.}

_[I prefer to think of the sound as a bone xylophone.]_

{Well, that's SLIGHTLY less disturbing, I suppose. I always thought of it was the rain knocking, politely but insistently, to be let in.}

_[And that's supposed to be less disturbing how? Because that sounds like creepy stalker behavior.]_

{Okay, fine. Maybe, like, a soothing lullaby?}

_[Lullabies are always sad and creepy.]_

{Wow, there's no way to win, is there?}

“Welcome to my life,” Wade laughed wryly. 

He didn't look at the window to see the raindrops shattering against the glass, but on the bloodstained carpet he saw how the lighting changed from lemon-yellow to raspberry-blue, and he idly wondered why the hell it was called raspberry blue, anyway, when raspberries were red, and kind of on the light side of red, at that, except he supposed the raspberries were also kind of sour, and maybe that's why sour blue was called raspberry-blue. 

Wade yawned, and his jaw cracked. 

Flopping back onto his back (ouch), Wade stared up at the ceiling again, starting to count the blood splatters up there. 

However, he was interrupted by more knocking at the door. This knocking was also nervous, but it was slower, more paced-hesitant than business-urgent. 

“Mr. Wilson?” called a familiar voice. “Are you in there? Mr. Wil—oh! Uh, okay, the door's open… that means I can come in, right?” 

Groaning, Wade stuffed his head into the pillow. _Go away, Bob,_ he thought irritably. 

“Mr. Wilson? Hello? Uh, I just came to… uh… well, you said… and it's raining out there, so… I was, uh, wondering… Mr. Wilson? Are you, uh, in your bedroom?” 

Wade stuffed his face farther into the pillow. 

“Mr. Wil—! Wait, why are you lying in bed and why are your sheets all bloody?! Oh god, Mr. Wilson, are you okay?!” The footsteps started to rush closer, but Wade pulled a gun out from under him, pointing it at Bob, who froze. 

“Mr. Wilson,” Bob squeaked. 

“Out, Bob,” Wade grumbled menacingly into the pillow, not looking at him. 

“But Mr. Wilson, you're—you're bleeding?! Why haven't you healed it?!” 

_“Out,”_ Wade growled. 

“Oh, uh, okay… but, uh,” the footsteps retreated backwards slowly, “it's, uh, raining really hard out there, Mr. Wilson, and I… I don't have a raincoat… I managed to get inside the building before I got too soaked, but uh...” 

“There's an umbrella by the door,” Wade grumbled, still not looking up from where his face was shoved into the pillow, but his gun still held steadily pointing at the HYDRA agent. “Take it and get out.”

Bob squeaked with fear, but managed to say, “Th-thank you, Mr. Wilson...” before screeching again and scurrying out when Wade clicked the safety on the gun off. 

As soon as Bob left, Wade dropped his arm back to the bed, hand relaxing to splay loosely over the gun's cool surface. 

“Not today,” he grumbled into the pillow, a hitch in his voice. “I'm not talking to anyone today.” 

He was tired. He didn't want to move. He didn't want to think. His brain was functioning at an even lower state than normal, and he was pretty sure, if pushed, that the only part of his brain that would be able to respond was the violent and homicidal part, because that was the part of him that never slept, never fatigued, never pained, never doubted itself. 

Oh, sure, he second-guessed that part of his brain sometimes, with other, higher-thinking parts of his brain, but those were practically offline right now, and wouldn't be able to keep the automatic weapon in check. 

He felt at the same time incredibly dangerous, and utterly helpless. 

{Hey, but we're not offline! You don't trust us to talk sense into you?}

_[We're not part of him, remember? We're just disembodied voices, and we only have influence when there's some part of his brain that will listen.]_

{I'm feeling blue…}

_[But you're yellow.]_

{Shut up! And you're white!}

_[Racist!]_

{That is not even funny any more.}

Wade grunted into the pillow. 

And then he must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing he knew, he was walking down the street, and he could feel the wind through his hair, could see and feel the blond wisps of hair as they were blown into his face, tickling his skin, which didn't hurt. 

So it surprised him when people still started screaming when they looked at him. 

And then he was screaming, and they were scared, and he was scared, because he didn't know what was wrong because he was _healed,_ he was _fine,_ he wasn't a _monster._

But then he caught sight of himself in a shop window—a coffee shop window, and people on the other side were looking out at him and scrambling away, screaming, but he shifted his gaze to the glass, and saw that his left eye was missing. 

But the eye hadn't been gouged it—there was no empty socket. Instead, where the eye should be was covered in skin, and even though there was an indent in his face like there should be an eyesocket there, there didn't appear to have ever been an eye there, because when he reached up to touch the area, there was no give. The spot was smooth bone covered in skin. 

And his right eye—his right eye was blue and shiny and scared, and when he started crying the tears came from that eye only, nothing but blood flowing from the spot where his left eye should be as he clawed at it, wondering why there was no place for an eye underneath. 

And the people inside the coffee shop were still screaming, and screaming, and screaming, and there was screaming everywhere, except that then Wade realized that all the screaming was coming from his own mouth, and that he was alone in front of a mirror, and he was trying to claw at the space with both hands, but only his right hand was there, clawing. 

And when he looked down to find out why, he saw that his left arm was missing, and he was filled with anger as he wondered why it had left him without telling him, because hadn't he treated it well?! There was no reason for it to leave! 

And then the missing left arm leapt out of nowhere, gripping his throat and strangling him with two fingers, lifting him up, and the arm was metal and was gripping his throat tightly, so tightly, and he was kicking and he _couldn't breathe—_

He awoke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright (ow!), panting, and both his hands were on his face, feeling that both his eyes were there. 

And then he was glaring at his left arm, because “Don't you dare betray me like that!” but then he wondered if he was afraid of his own left arm betraying him, or the man who the metal arm should actually have belonged to, who had already betrayed him several times, but Wade had betrayed him back several times, so he'd thought they were even, as it were. 

But then again, it was just a dream, he remind himself as his breathing evened out, and dreams didn't mean anything more often than they did. 

{Hey, why is it that our dreams lately keep involving us having missing body parts or other body oddness?} 

_[Just be glad we haven't ended up with tentacles yet.]_

{Now that could be kinky.}

“Fuck,” Wade grunted, flopping back down onto the mattress (ouch) and glaring at the ceiling. Because he was tired, and he didn't feel like doing anything, but he certainly didn't feel like sleeping anymore, either. 

Maybe he should get out of bed. Move to the couch, turn on the TV, try to rot out his already rotted-feeling brain. Maybe if he exacerbated the rot enough he wouldn't feel it anymore—the spreading muckiness in his head that made him feel like there really was nothing there but useless, lifeless gray clay, just like the ancient Greeks thought, and his body would be powered by nothing but his heart. 

But then he'd just be a killing machine, so he supposed he should thank his gray and white brain matter for the madness-reducing lethargy. At least, he supposed that that was what this was—a need to recuperate after the feverish and deadly activity of the past two weeks—a reminder that a moving, killing body tended to gain speed until it couldn't stop, because it knew nothing else. 

But Wade knew misery, and he'd been running from it, but now he was staring at it straight in its lemon-yellow eyes as it flicked its raspberry-blue song, and the slithering of its scaly, lithe body on the ground sounded like falling rain, and its fangs were sunk deep in his unhealing chest and he _knew_ misery. 

He knew what the people he killed saw and felt right before he killed them, because he saw and felt it every time he woke up, every time he slowed down and glanced over his shoulder, every time he watched his wounded flesh heal itself back together—he knew the feeling of no escape, of fear and of resignation, of helplessness that there was no way to stop what was about to happen. 

And as he rolled out of bed onto the floor, the wound in his midriff tugging and hurting in a way that was gloriously real and delicious because of that, the taste of blood in his mouth, he crawled on his hands and knees out of his bedroom to the couch—crawling because he wasn't yet ready to stand, not today—and pulled himself up onto it, flopping like a seal, he thought that maybe that was what he was doing—spending the day in a lengthened version of that moment his victims had before death.

He could die when he woke up tomorrow, stand up and keep moving in his endless, undead way, too fast for the thoughts to collect and congeal, hiding in the open under the spotlight and demanding yet more light be shone on him, and somebody start the fucking disco ball, dammit! He was gonna groove!

He was gonna groove, because it was all he knew how to do. 

But today he would live this bitter-sour misery, suck the lemon dry so he could spend the next long while spitting the acid back out, burning through souls with each fatal bullet wound and sword strike, a fine spray of poison lemon laced into every pop-rock-word, every sizzle and crack that was too-bright and too-loud and too-much. 

He stared at the blank, reflective but matte black screen of the TV, smiling sharply at his face. The screen made the smile softer—no less crazy, but kinder. 

Misery slithered in the sound of the raindrops, and Wade pressed his fingers to his midriff, pushing at the wound so he could feel the poison deeper, and he pushed harder still till blood was oozing red between the strips of silver duct tape, over his hand, and in the TV screen the blood looked black but glistened yellow in the light from the window. 

Wade was staring at his black glove, dripping with thick sanguine, when there was a knock on the door.

The knock was loud and authoritative, and so was the voice that followed it. “Wade.” Both the knock and the word were short, to the point, all business and no space for protests. 

{The prodigal son returns!}

Wade kept staring at the blood dripping from his fingers onto the floor between his legs. 

_Drip. Drip. Drip._

The door was opened, closed, and Cable strode into the room. 

“Wade,” he said, kneeling next to he mercenary and touching fingers to the duct tape bandages that were oozing blood between the cracks. He looked up to meet Wade's gaze, his expression unreadable, voice stoic. “What happened?” 

Wade shrugged, looking back at him. “Magic sword,” he said, and since Cable had taken his other hand in one of his own fucking huge ones, Wade tugged the blood-saturated glove off with his teeth, tossing the glove aside with a toss of his head. 

The blood had soaked through the glove, and red coated the skin of his hand, making his already marred flesh look even more grotesque. 

Wade considered his red-slick hand for a moment before proceeding to suck and lick the blood from his fingers. 

Cable hated the taste of his own blood. 

Wade had tasted his own blood so often that he didn't mind now; it was an almost welcome taste, really. Almost comforting. 

Cable watched him with that unreadable, stoic expression. 

“Wade,” he said again, softer, and Wade knew his name was boring as hell but he loved his name when Cable said it. Because Cable made it sound like something meaningful—beautiful, even, maybe.

“I don't want to talk to you today, Nate,” Wade said, looking back down and picking at a thin thread of duct tape that was peeling from the edges of the bandage. “Not today.” 

Because the muckiness was still there in his head, the lemon-yellow eyes in the TV, and scales slithering on the roof, raspberry-blue tongue flicking outside the windows, and all Wade could feel coiling inside his heavy body was that violence, trying to lap away at the lethargy. 

“Let me help you,” Cable said, squeezing his hand a bit too hard to be reassuring. The grip was more desperate, really. 

“Not today,” Wade repeated—and ah, there was the lemon venom. He met Cable's eyes, and the larger man flinched back, ever so almost unnoticeably, and Wade—the higher parts of his brain, the observers—wondered if Nate could see the yellow in his eyes. “I'll be fine tomorrow. But just let me have _today,_ Nathan.”

Cable's eyes widened at the use of his full first name, because Wade never called him Nathan. To Wade he was Nate, or Priscilla, or Cable sometimes, or occasionally Nathan Dayspring Askani'son Summers or some variation of that because Wade thought his name was ridiculous, but never just Nathan. 

And Cable thought of himself as Nathan most of the time, but the name sounded so alien when spat from Wade's lips like that. 

“Two weeks of nonstop work,” Wade said, something in his voice, something in his eyes, that made Nathan pause and swallow anything he might have said. “Two weeks of nonstop _killing_ , nonstop _dying,_ nonstop _injuries_ , nonstop _joking_ —I just want a day, Nathan. _One_ fucking day, to do absolutely _nothing._ One day where I don't have to talk to do you, or deal with the drama of whatever the fuck our relationship is.” 

Wade's face was hard, but there was something cracking in his eyes, and Nathan knew suddenly that he did not want whatever that dam was to break. 

“Is that really too much to ask?” Wade breathed, voice trembling like a cocked gun in the hands of someone who didn't want to shoot, but knew there might not be any other choice. 

Letting go of Wade's hand, Nathan stood up and left. 

His hand was on the doorknob as Wade's voice said behind him, still from the couch and almost too quiet to be heard, “I'll be fine tomorrow, Nate. I promise…”

Nathan paused, nodding once, before exiting the apartment, but without looking back.

After Cable had left, Wade—feeling wrung out like a bloody rag somebody kept trying to wash all the stains out of but _couldn't_ —turned his stare back to the TV screen. 

He stared at his softened reflection there for so long that his skin peeled away to reveal the skull underneath, and his somber lips were pulled away to reveal the eternal grin that had been hiding behind them.

The TV was blaring white noise in the background, but the white was stained with yellow, and Wade was staring at the TV screen for hours before he realized that it wasn't on, and the white noise he'd thought was the TV was actually from the voices in his head. 

The abbreviation 'TV' looked funny. Short for television, which sounded kinda like tunnel-vision, like what happens when you're scared and the Fight or Flight response takes over. But the T and V together, themselves—TV—reminded Wade of aliens. But not Kree or Skrulls or any of those real aliens, but the generic type that didn't actually exist—the ones with the huge oval eyes and the upside-down teardrop heads, and the glow-in-the-dark green skin. Those aliens. 

Which didn't really make sense, since the aliens were all creepy curves, and TV was all straight lines, but the fact remained that when Wade imagined the word TV, he also got the ghost image of a generic alien. 

'Nathan' would be a good name for an alien, Wade thought. Behold the alien: Nathan! 

Nate kinda seemed like an alien in this time period, anyways. 

Wade was sitting there and thinking about nothing in particular, idly picking at the duct tape around his middle, when there was more knocking at the door—sharp, rough knocking. 

“Wade, what the hell's goin' on?” barked a familiar, screechy voice. 

Well, there was a surprise. 

“Not now, Al,” Wade said dully, as the blind old crazy lady {Batty biddy, heh!} tapped her way into the room in her don't-you-dare-give-me-shit manner that she went about absolutely everything. 

“Both Weasel and Bob came to me today tellin' me that you're in some kinda funk,” Blind Al said, waving her cane at him. The large black sunglasses on her narrow face gave her a somewhat alien look, but the trousers and striped shirt rather made up for it with the terribly human way the colors clashed. 

{Who does she let pick out her clothes, huh?}

_[She probably picks them out herself.]_

Wade cocked a gun—audibly, so she'd know—and pointed it at her. “It's a bad day, Al. Go away.”

Blind Al regarded him for a moment, and then she laughed her harsh, grating laugh. “You'll be fine tomorrow,” she said, still grinning as she turned and tapped her way out of the apartment. 

“Yeah,” Wade said quietly, and the gun nearly fell out of his lethargic fingers.

Down the hall, Weasel and Bob were waiting anxiously. 

“Well?” Weasel asked. 

“Is Mr. Wilson okay?” Bob said worriedly. 

Blind Al cackled. “He'll be fine. He always is. He'll be back to his normal self tomorrow, just you watch.” 

Then she tapped her way past them, humming to herself. 

“Is what she says true?” Bob whispered to Weasel as they followed after. “Will Mr. Wilson really be back to normal tomorrow? He seemed really...” Bob trailed off, worrying at his lip and scratching nervously at the back of his neck through the green HYDRA suit he seemed to refuse to take off. 

“Oh, yeah,” Weasel said with an unconcerned shrug, looking down at his phone and sliding his finger over the screen as he walked. “If Al says so, then yeah.” 

“How can she tell?” Bob asked, glancing at the old woman in front of him, than over his shoulder down the hall where Wade's apartment was. 

“Better not to ask that,” Weasel advised him without looking up from his phone. “They're both crazy. Practically on the same wavelength.” 

“I heard that!” Blind Al shouted back at them, making Bob jump and cling to Weasel's arm. 

“Hey!” Weasel said indignantly, glaring at the HYDRA agent through his glasses and shaking him off his arm. “I'm playing Candy Crush, here!” 

Back in Wade's apartment, the mercenary had crawled under the coffee table, staring at the sticker of an apple on the underside and idly wondering how it had gotten there. Maybe the table was made out of apple wood? If somebody removed Wade's bones and turned them into a table, he'd certainly hope they'd put a Deadpool sticker on the underside. 

When the sky outside the window turned to a split-lip sunset, then bruise-purple and shiner-gray, Wade crawled out from under the table and moved to the bathroom. 

He peeled off the blood-stiff Deadpool suit, and, standing there naked, began pulling off the duct tape bandage. 

Large chunks of skin peeled off with the tape, till the gaping gash in his midriff was entirely revealed, blood starting to ooze again, the skin around it an infected, angry red. 

Wade took a shower, the warm water washing over him like sleep in its most refreshing form, and when he stepped out and wrapped a towel around his waist, the water was still trickling down his face like tears and beaded on his body like sweat, but cleaner. 

He wrapped the sorcery-derived wound back up again—with real bandages, this time—and slipped on boxers and a t-shirt.

The t-shirt was red, and the boxers were covered in happy faces.

Then he moved to his bedroom to change the bloodied cheats and clean the bloodied carpet, then out to the front room to clean more blood from the carpet and the couch, the sill of the window where he'd crawled up and tumbled inside the night before.

In the dark, the voices in his head weren't so grating, the silences in between their words not so disturbing, the pain in his midriff not so biting, the misery shrouding him not so nauseating. 

The yellow was gone, and the concentrated red-wine color that replaced it was deep and soft and soothing, like blood but sweeter and more transparent. 

The darkness veiled Wade's skin, and he could almost feel handsome like that, as a smoothly-moving shadow through the liquid dark.

Wade cleaned until it felt like he'd scrubbed away enough muck and grime—in his house, in his head—that he might be afforded an almost-new start, of sorts.

As the sky lightened, so did the red-wine color, deepening to full opacity and brightening to a stoplight-red that meant Go; a red like his costume; a _Deadpool_ red. 

And when the sunlight streamed white-golden through the window and landed on Wade's marred skin, throwing all the scars and sores into sharp relief, Wade grinned, keen and gleeful.

* * *

_**~Blind Al's house, 10:14 AM~** _

* * *

“Hey Al,” Deadpool greeted, sitting atop the kitchen table when the old lady walked in. “You picked up a couple vagrants.”

“Weasel's here to fix my radio,” Blind Al said, not even flinching as she went about the kitchen fixing up a cup of coffee for herself. “Bob followed him like a stray dog.” 

Deadpool snorted. “Yeah, Bob does that,” he drawled, the white eyes of his mask blank, but behind the mask, his eyes were following her movements, and his lips were twitching. 

“A little slow in the head, but he's nice enough,” Blind Al said, sitting down at the table with the cup of coffee, adding cream, sugar, stirring with a spoon. “You gave him quite the scare yesterday” 

“You can scare him just by clapping your _hands_ too loud,” Deadpool snorted. 

“Maybe. Ain't no fun in it, though,” Blind Al pointed out. She took a sip of her coffee, and sighed. “Wade. Did you really switch the salt and the sugar again?” 

Cackling, Deadpool vaulted off the table and ran out of the room, making such a ruckus that Bob screamed, and then Weasel was yelling at them not to hit knock over the radio because he was working on it, dammit Wade! 

Blind Al sighed, stirring her undrinkable coffee with the spoon. “At least he didn't put any laxatives in.”

* * *

_**~Cable's study in his top-secret X-Force base, 1:49 PM~** _

* * *

Cable had several newspapers spread on the desk before him, frowning as circled headlines and cut out articles, moving them around as he tried to fit the pieces together. 

Suddenly arms circled around his neck from behind him, a low, gravelly Demi Moore voice rasping in his ear, “Nathan Dayspring Askani'son Summers, you're a hard man to find.”

Cable had immediately tensed, but then he relaxed, leaning back into the embrace. “Wade.” 

A gloved finger ran along his jaw, and then suddenly the pen was no longer in his hand and Deadpool was sitting in his lap, scribbling on the newspapers. 

_“Wade!”_ Cable yelped, trying to push him away. “Don't mess with those! They're _important!”_

“Amazing how the absence or addition of facial hair can really make someone look completely different, huh?” Deadpool asked, having vaulted over to the other side of the table, capping the pen and tossing it back at Cable, who caught it. 

Cable glanced down at the photos Wade had altered, blinking. “Is that…?” 

“The son of Bolivar Trask?” Deadpool said, grinning behind the mask. “You bet. He looks _so much_ like his dad when he has the same mustache, doesn't he?” 

And then Deadpool was swaggering out of the room, and Cable couldn't keep his lips from twitching upwards.

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts?


End file.
